clawfort/openspec/changes/archive/2026-02-13-p08-seo-tweaks/proposal.md

Why

ClawFort currently lacks a formal SEO and structured-data specification, which limits discoverability and consistency for search crawlers. Defining this now ensures the news experience is indexable, standards-oriented, and performance-focused as the content footprint grows.

What Changes

• Add search-focused metadata requirements for the main page and policy pages (description, canonical, robots, social preview tags).
• Define structured data requirements so the home page is represented as Newspaper and each news item is represented as NewsArticle.
• Establish performance requirements for transport and caching behavior (HTTP compression and cache directives) plus front-end loading behavior.
• Define UX and rendering requirements for image lazy loading with shimmer placeholders and smooth scrolling.
• Require markup and interaction patterns that are compatible with strict standards validation goals.

Capabilities

New Capabilities

• seo-meta-and-social-tags: Standardize meta, canonical, robots, and social preview tags for key public pages.
• news-structured-data: Provide machine-readable Newspaper and NewsArticle structured data for homepage and article entries.
• delivery-and-rendering-performance: Define response compression/caching and client-side loading behavior for faster page delivery.

Modified Capabilities

• None.

Impact

• Frontend/UI: frontend/index.html and static policy pages gain SEO metadata, structured-data hooks, and loading-state behavior requirements.
• Backend/API Delivery: backend/main.py response middleware/headers are affected by compression and cache policy expectations.
• Quality/Validation: Standards conformance and SEO validation become explicit acceptance criteria for this change.
• Operations: Performance posture depends on HTTP behavior and deploy/runtime configuration alignment.